For the first part, I found Debian’s Maintainers’ Guide [0] pretty helpful when I was updating xscreensaver last year (hasn’t been uploaded yet though...). It a

For the first part, I found Debian’s Maintainers’ Guide [0] pretty helpful when I was updating xscreensaver last year (hasn’t been uploaded yet though...). It also has a section at the beginning concerning how to adopt orphaned packages. For upstream updates, some projects will have a way to create deb packages themselves, which can make installation/updates easier later on (concrete example, with OpenZFS can create RPMs and debs from the upstream tree). 0: https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debmake-doc/index.en.html https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debmake-doc/index.en.html